I’ve been working my “intellectual biography of Joseph Smith” for a long time now (hope to finish before too long), or an attempt to traced where Smith got his ideas. By “intellectual biography” I mean the focus on his ideas. Framing the project in this way is Inherently controversial from within the faith as his revelatory claims believed by followers are that the ideas came from God or from lost scriptures also with God as the ultimate source.

I’ve been at this a while, but one part of my claim is that JS, it looks to me, would have had access to all the ideas he taught, to Mormonism, including the Book of Mormon, from particular sources. Yes, Mormonism was/is quite different than the prevailing Protestantism, so he wasn’t drawing on orthodox Protestantism for the distinctly Mormon stuff, but those idea were still out there.

No doubt such claims can prompt a lot of debate and can be taken as an attack on the faith. I’ve been at this a while, am still a practicing Mormon, and I recently finished serving as bishop of my ward having been released this last May.

How this all works for me is a bit complicated and I’ll share some thoughts, but for this series I’m mainly interested in thinking about the process of being faithful to the historian’s enterprise while I also felt spiritual prompted to keep practicing the faith, saying yes to callings (including bishop), and continuing to wrestle with all this tricky stuff. So I’m thinking of sharing some thoughts on this process as I hopefully get closer to wrapping of the project. One of the major themes throughout this process is the question of what is the highest priority in historical inquiry about what are often termed Mormon truth claims (JS’s angelical and revelatory experiences, plates, BoM historicity, etc)? Is the highest priority historical methods or the defense of those claims? Do we need to start with the defense of those positions as the goal or not? What is the process like if “not” is the answer?

More to come.